Charles Choi is back with another of his “Casual” packages. This time it’s for what some of us consider the the dumpster fire that is Info1. His latest offering, Casual Info, provides a porcelain for Info that not only provides a menu for Info but also rationalizes some of the keystrokes.
As Choi says, most users probably expect Info to behave more or less like a Web browser, yet Info is almost perverse in its choice of UI. To be fair, the Info interface was fixed long before Web browsers were popular but almost everyone is going to find it disconcerting. That’s why Choi changed some of the bindings on his interface.
Alphapapa suggested that since Transient is now an Emacs builtin, Choi should offer his various Casual packages as part of vanilla Emacs. That makes a bit of sense. All of them help with the use of Emacs functionalities that have hard to remember bindings and would be a boon to not just n00bs but even more experienced folks like me who have trouble remembering seldom used bindings.
Choi seemed open to the suggestion. My opinion is that they’re a worthy addition but it doesn’t really matter. If you want them, they’re easily available from MELPA. Having them in core might, I suppose, aid discoverability. Regardless, I certainly wouldn’t object to their inclusion.
If you, too, find the Info interface maddening, take a look at Choi’s post for an alternative. Perhaps it will one day be built in but regardless MELPA is only a couple of keystrokes away.
Footnotes:
“Dumpster fire” is probably too harsh but it’s certainly fair to say that its user interface is less than optimal.